OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Making first order linear logic a generating grammar
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

It is known that different categorial grammars have surface representation in a fragment of first order multiplicative linear logic (MLL1). We show that the fragment of interest is equivalent to the recently introduced extended tensor type calculus (ETTC). ETTC is a calculus of specific typed terms, which represent tuples of strings, more precisely bipartite graphs decorated with strings. Types are derived from linear logic formulas, and rules correspond to concrete operations on these string-labeled graphs, so that they can be conveniently visualized. This provides the above mentioned fragment of MLL1 that is relevant for language modeling not only with some alternative syntax and intuitive geometric representation, but also with an intrinsic deductive system, which has been absent. In this work we consider a non-trivial notationally enriched variation of the previously introduced ETTC, which allows more concise and transparent computations. We present both a cut-free sequent calculus and a natural deduction formalism.
Utilitarian Welfare Optimization in the Generalized Vertex Coloring Games: An Implication to Venue Selection in Events Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a general class of multi-agent games in networks, namely the generalized vertex coloring games (G-VCGs), inspired by real-life applications of the venue selection problem in events planning. Certain utility responding to the contemporary coloring assignment will be received by each agent under some particular mechanism, who, striving to maximize his own utility, is restricted to local information thus self-organizing when choosing another color. Our focus is on maximizing some utilitarian-looking welfare objective function concerning the cumulative utilities across the network in a decentralized fashion. Firstly, we investigate on a special class of the G-VCGs, namely Identical Preference VCGs (IP-VCGs) which recovers the rudimentary work by \cite{chaudhuri2008network}. We reveal its convergence even under a completely greedy policy and completely synchronous settings, with a stochastic bound on the converging rate provided. Secondly, regarding the general G-VCGs, a greediness-preserved Metropolis-Hasting based policy is proposed for each agent to initiate with the limited information and its optimality under asynchronous settings is proved using theories from the regular perturbed Markov processes. The policy was also empirically witnessed to be robust under independently synchronous settings. Thirdly, in the spirit of ``robust coloring'', we include an expected loss term in our objective function to balance between the utilities and robustness. An optimal coloring for this robust welfare optimization would be derived through a second-stage MH-policy driven algorithm. Simulation experiments are given to showcase the efficiency of our proposed strategy.
Channel Estimation for Delay Alignment Modulation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Delay alignment modulation (DAM) is a promising technology for inter-symbol interference (ISI)-free communication without relying on sophisticated channel equalization or multi-carrier transmissions. The key ideas of DAM are delay precompensation and path-based beamforming, so that the multi-path signal components will arrive at the receiver simultaneously and constructively, rather than causing the detrimental ISI. However, the practical implementation of DAM requires channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. Therefore, in this letter, we study an efficient channel estimation method for DAM based on block orthogonal matching pursuit (BOMP) algorithm, by exploiting the block sparsity of the channel vector. Based on the imperfectly estimated CSI, the delay pre-compensations and tap-based beamforming are designed for DAM, and the resulting performance is studied. Simulation results demonstrate that with the BOMP-based channel estimation method, the CSI can be effectively acquired with low training overhead, and the performance of DAM based on estimated CSI is comparable to the ideal case with perfect CSI.
mvHOTA: A multi-view higher order tracking accuracy metric to measure spatial and temporal associations in multi-point detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-point tracking is a challenging task that involves detecting points in the scene and tracking them across a sequence of frames. Computing detection-based measures like the F-measure on a frame-by-frame basis is not sufficient to assess the overall performance, as it does not interpret performance in the temporal domain. The main evaluation metric available comes from Multi-object tracking (MOT) methods to benchmark performance on datasets such as KITTI with the recently proposed higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) metric, which is capable of providing a better description of the performance over metrics such as MOTA, DetA, and IDF1. While the HOTA metric takes into account temporal associations, it does not provide a tailored means to analyse the spatial associations of a dataset in a multi-camera setup. Moreover, there are differences in evaluating the detection task for points when compared to objects (point distances vs. bounding box overlap). Therefore in this work, we propose a multi-view higher order tracking metric (mvHOTA) to determine the accuracy of multi-point (multi-instance and multi-class) tracking methods, while taking into account temporal and spatial associations.mvHOTA can be interpreted as the geometric mean of detection, temporal, and spatial associations, thereby providing equal weighting to each of the factors. We demonstrate the use of this metric to evaluate the tracking performance on an endoscopic point detection dataset from a previously organised surgical data science challenge. Furthermore, we compare with other adjusted MOT metrics for this use-case, discuss the properties of mvHOTA, and show how the proposed multi-view Association and the Occlusion index (OI) facilitate analysis of methods with respect to handling of occlusions. The code is available at https://github.com/Cardio-AI/mvhota.
Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning through Bootstrapped Opportunistic Curriculum
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Despite considerable advances in deep reinforcement learning, it has been shown to be highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations to state observations. Recent efforts that have attempted to improve adversarial robustness of reinforcement learning can nevertheless tolerate only very small perturbations, and remain fragile as perturbation size increases. We propose Bootstrapped Opportunistic Adversarial Curriculum Learning (BCL), a novel flexible adversarial curriculum learning framework for robust reinforcement learning. Our framework combines two ideas: conservatively bootstrapping each curriculum phase with highest quality solutions obtained from multiple runs of the previous phase, and opportunistically skipping forward in the curriculum. In our experiments we show that the proposed BCL framework enables dramatic improvements in robustness of learned policies to adversarial perturbations. The greatest improvement is for Pong, where our framework yields robustness to perturbations of up to 25/255; in contrast, the best existing approach can only tolerate adversarial noise up to 5/255. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jlwu002/BCL.
Toward Unpaired Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation via Learning Structured Semantic Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Integrating multi-modal data to promote medical image analysis has recently gained great attention. This paper presents a novel scheme to learn the mutual benefits of different modalities to achieve better segmentation results for unpaired multi-modal medical images. Our approach tackles two critical issues of this task from a practical perspective: (1) how to effectively learn the semantic consistencies of various modalities (e.g., CT and MRI), and (2) how to leverage the above consistencies to regularize the network learning while preserving its simplicity. To address (1), we leverage a carefully designed External Attention Module (EAM) to align semantic class representations and their correlations of different modalities. To solve (2), the proposed EAM is designed as an external plug-and-play one, which can be discarded once the model is optimized. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on two medical image segmentation scenarios: (1) cardiac structure segmentation, and (2) abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Extensive results show that the proposed method outperforms its counterparts by a wide margin.
Orthogonal dissection into few rectangles
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2023
Year: 2023

We describe a polynomial time algorithm that takes as input a polygon with axis-parallel sides but irrational vertex coordinates, and outputs a set of as few rectangles as possible into which it can be dissected by axis-parallel cuts and translations. The number of rectangles is the rank of the Dehn invariant of the polygon. The same method can also be used to dissect an axis-parallel polygon into a simple polygon with the minimum possible number of edges. When rotations or reflections are allowed, we can approximate the minimum number of rectangles to within a factor of two.
BiometricBlender: Ultra-high dimensional, multi-class synthetic data generator to imitate biometric feature space
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The lack of freely available (real-life or synthetic) high or ultra-high dimensional, multi-class datasets may hamper the rapidly growing research on feature screening, especially in the field of biometrics, where the usage of such datasets is common. This paper reports a Python package called BiometricBlender, which is an ultra-high dimensional, multi-class synthetic data generator to benchmark a wide range of feature screening methods. During the data generation process, the overall usefulness and the intercorrelations of blended features can be controlled by the user, thus the synthetic feature space is able to imitate the key properties of a real biometric dataset.
Learning Debiased Classifier with Biased Committee
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Neural networks are prone to be biased towards spurious correlations between classes and latent attributes exhibited in a major portion of training data, which ruins their generalization capability. We propose a new method for training debiased classifiers with no spurious attribute label. The key idea is to employ a committee of classifiers as an auxiliary module that identifies bias-conflicting data, i.e., data without spurious correlation, and assigns large weights to them when training the main classifier. The committee is learned as a bootstrapped ensemble so that a majority of its classifiers are biased as well as being diverse, and intentionally fail to predict classes of bias-conflicting data accordingly. The consensus within the committee on prediction difficulty thus provides a reliable cue for identifying and weighting bias-conflicting data. Moreover, the committee is also trained with knowledge transferred from the main classifier so that it gradually becomes debiased along with the main classifier and emphasizes more difficult data as training progresses. On five real-world datasets, our method outperforms prior arts using no spurious attribute label like ours and even surpasses those relying on bias labels occasionally.
Deep Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Federated Learning for Robust Short-term Utility Demand Forecasting in Electricity Wholesale Markets
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Short-term load forecasting (STLF) plays a significant role in the operation of electricity trading markets. Considering the growing concern of data privacy, federated learning (FL) is increasingly adopted to train STLF models for utility companies (UCs) in recent research. Inspiringly, in wholesale markets, as it is not realistic for power plants (PPs) to access UCs' data directly, FL is definitely a feasible solution of obtaining an accurate STLF model for PPs. However, due to FL's distributed nature and intense competition among UCs, defects increasingly occur and lead to poor performance of the STLF model, indicating that simply adopting FL is not enough. In this paper, we propose a DRL-assisted FL approach, DEfect-AwaRe federated soft actor-critic (DearFSAC), to robustly train an accurate STLF model for PPs to forecast precise short-term utility electricity demand. Firstly. we design a STLF model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) using just historical load data and time data. Furthermore, considering the uncertainty of defects occurrence, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm is adopted to assist FL by alleviating model degradation caused by defects. In addition, for faster convergence of FL training, an auto-encoder is designed for both dimension reduction and quality evaluation of uploaded models. In the simulations, we validate our approach on real data of Helsinki's UCs in 2019. The results show that DearFSAC outperforms all the other approaches no matter if defects occur or not.
Learning Viewpoint-Agnostic Visual Representations by Recovering Tokens in 3D Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Humans are remarkably flexible in understanding viewpoint changes due to visual cortex supporting the perception of 3D structure. In contrast, most of the computer vision models that learn visual representation from a pool of 2D images often fail to generalize over novel camera viewpoints. Recently, the vision architectures have shifted towards convolution-free architectures, visual Transformers, which operate on tokens derived from image patches. However, these Transformers do not perform explicit operations to learn viewpoint-agnostic representation for visual understanding. To this end, we propose a 3D Token Representation Layer (3DTRL) that estimates the 3D positional information of the visual tokens and leverages it for learning viewpoint-agnostic representations. The key elements of 3DTRL include a pseudo-depth estimator and a learned camera matrix to impose geometric transformations on the tokens, trained in an unsupervised fashion. These enable 3DTRL to recover the 3D positional information of the tokens from 2D patches. In practice, 3DTRL is easily plugged-in into a Transformer. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of 3DTRL in many vision tasks including image classification, multi-view video alignment, and action recognition. The models with 3DTRL outperform their backbone Transformers in all the tasks with minimal added computation. Our code is available at https://github.com/elicassion/3DTRL.
Indecision Trees: Learning Argument-Based Reasoning under Quantified Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Using Machine Learning systems in the real world can often be problematic, with inexplicable black-box models, the assumed certainty of imperfect measurements, or providing a single classification instead of a probability distribution. This paper introduces Indecision Trees, a modification to Decision Trees which learn under uncertainty, can perform inference under uncertainty, provide a robust distribution over the possible labels, and can be disassembled into a set of logical arguments for use in other reasoning systems.
Multi-Frequency Joint Community Detection and Phase Synchronization
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper studies the joint community detection and phase synchronization problem on the \textit{stochastic block model with relative phase}, where each node is associated with an unknown phase angle. This problem, with a variety of real-world applications, aims to recover the cluster structure and associated phase angles simultaneously. We show this problem exhibits a \textit{``multi-frequency''} structure by closely examining its maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) formulation, whereas existing methods are not originated from this perspective. To this end, two simple yet efficient algorithms that leverage the MLE formulation and benefit from the information across multiple frequencies are proposed. The former is a spectral method based on the novel multi-frequency column-pivoted QR factorization. The factorization applied to the top eigenvectors of the observation matrix provides key information about the cluster structure and associated phase angles. The second approach is an iterative multi-frequency generalized power method, where each iteration updates the estimation in a matrix-multiplication-then-projection manner. Numerical experiments show that our proposed algorithms significantly improve the ability of exactly recovering the cluster structure and the accuracy of the estimated phase angles, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Toward multi-target self-organizing pursuit in a partially observable Markov game
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

The multiple-target self-organizing pursuit (SOP) problem has wide applications and has been considered a challenging self-organization game for distributed systems, in which intelligent agents cooperatively pursue multiple dynamic targets with partial observations. This work proposes a framework for decentralized multi-agent systems to improve the implicit coordination capabilities in search and pursuit. We model a self-organizing system as a partially observable Markov game (POMG) featured by large-scale, decentralization, partial observation, and noncommunication. The proposed distributed algorithm: fuzzy self-organizing cooperative coevolution (FSC2) is then leveraged to resolve the three challenges in multi-target SOP: distributed self-organizing search (SOS), distributed task allocation, and distributed single-target pursuit. FSC2 includes a coordinated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) method that enables homogeneous agents to learn natural SOS patterns. Additionally, we propose a fuzzy-based distributed task allocation method, which locally decomposes multi-target SOP into several single-target pursuit problems. The cooperative coevolution principle is employed to coordinate distributed pursuers for each single-target pursuit problem. Therefore, the uncertainties of inherent partial observation and distributed decision-making in the POMG can be alleviated. The experimental results demonstrate that by decomposing the SOP task, FSC2 achieves superior performance compared with other implicit coordination policies fully trained by general MARL algorithms. The scalability of FSC2 is proved that up to 2048 FSC2 agents perform efficient multi-target SOP with almost 100 percent capture rates. Empirical analyses and ablation studies verify the interpretability, rationality, and effectiveness of component algorithms in FSC2.
Bag of Tricks for Long-Tail Visual Recognition of Animal Species in Camera-Trap Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Camera traps are a method for monitoring wildlife and they collect a large number of pictures. The number of images collected of each species usually follows a long-tail distribution, i.e., a few classes have a large number of instances, while a lot of species have just a small percentage. Although in most cases these rare species are the ones of interest to ecologists, they are often neglected when using deep-learning models because these models require a large number of images for the training. In this work, a simple and effective framework called Square-Root Sampling Branch (SSB) is proposed, which combines two classification branches that are trained using square-root sampling and instance sampling to improve long-tail visual recognition, and this is compared to state-of-the-art methods for handling this task: square-root sampling, class-balanced focal loss, and balanced group softmax. To achieve a more general conclusion, the methods for handling long-tail visual recognition were systematically evaluated in four families of computer vision models (ResNet, MobileNetV3, EfficientNetV2, and Swin Transformer) and four camera-trap datasets with different characteristics. Initially, a robust baseline with the most recent training tricks was prepared and, then, the methods for improving long-tail recognition were applied. Our experiments show that square-root sampling was the method that most improved the performance for minority classes by around 15%; however, this was at the cost of reducing the majority classes' accuracy by at least 3%. Our proposed framework (SSB) demonstrated itself to be competitive with the other methods and achieved the best or the second-best results for most of the cases for the tail classes; but, unlike the square-root sampling, the loss in the performance of the head classes was minimal, thus achieving the best trade-off among all the evaluated methods.
Attention-Guided Autoencoder for Automated Progression Prediction of Subjective Cognitive Decline with Structural MRI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is a preclinical stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) which occurs even before mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Progressive SCD will convert to MCI with the potential of further evolving to AD. Therefore, early identification of progressive SCD with neuroimaging techniques (e.g., structural MRI) is of great clinical value for early intervention of AD. However, existing MRI-based machine/deep learning methods usually suffer the small-sample-size problem which poses a great challenge to related neuroimaging analysis. The central question we aim to tackle in this paper is how to leverage related domains (e.g., AD/NC) to assist the progression prediction of SCD. Meanwhile, we are concerned about which brain areas are more closely linked to the identification of progressive SCD. To this end, we propose an attention-guided autoencoder model for efficient cross-domain adaptation which facilitates the knowledge transfer from AD to SCD. The proposed model is composed of four key components: 1) a feature encoding module for learning shared subspace representations of different domains, 2) an attention module for automatically locating discriminative brain regions of interest defined in brain atlases, 3) a decoding module for reconstructing the original input, 4) a classification module for identification of brain diseases. Through joint training of these four modules, domain invariant features can be learned. Meanwhile, the brain disease related regions can be highlighted by the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on the publicly available ADNI dataset and a private CLAS dataset have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model is straightforward to train and test with only 5-10 seconds on CPUs and is suitable for medical tasks with small datasets.
Black Box Optimization Using QUBO and the Cross Entropy Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Black-box optimization (BBO) can be used to optimize functions whose analytic form is unknown. A common approach to realising BBO is to learn a surrogate model which approximates the target black-box function which can then be solved via white-box optimization methods. In this paper, we present our approach BOX-QUBO, where the surrogate model is a QUBO matrix. However, unlike in previous state-of-the-art approaches, this matrix is not trained entirely by regression, but mostly by classification between 'good' and 'bad' solutions. This better accounts for the low capacity of the QUBO matrix, resulting in significantly better solutions overall. We tested our approach against the state-of-the-art on four domains and in all of them BOX-QUBO showed better results. A second contribution of this paper is the idea to also solve white-box problems, i.e. problems which could be directly formulated as QUBO, by means of black-box optimization in order to reduce the size of the QUBOs to the information-theoretic minimum. Experiments show that this significantly improves the results for MAX-k-SAT.